Best City Building Games

Updated September 2017: We’ve added a slew of new titles in the list along with adding a number of bonus video games at the end.

There aren’t many games that include themselves in the city builder genre. It’s a simple premise: you take on the role of planner, and mayor of a city. You look down upon your creation from above, and you are entirely responsible for its growth and management. City building games are exceptionally time consuming, and each game can go on forever—or at least until the city you are working on gets stale and you make a new one for different challenges.

Despite originally established in 1989 with the release of Will Wright’s SimCity, city builders haven’t had all that many releases in their 24 years of existence. In addition, they aren’t all that similar to each other in gameplay style.

Because it’s a genre full of duds and great titles are few and far between, we’ve compiled a list of the ten best city building video games. Likewise, we’ve included some bonus titles at the end.

Note: This list is not ranked in any particular order. This is simply a list of the top city building video games that are currently available.